Degenerations of Democracy

Craig Calhoun,Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar,Charles Taylor

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780674276017
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Three leading thinkers analyze the erosion of democracy's social foundations and call for a movement to reduce inequality, strengthen inclusive solidarity, empower citizens, and reclaim pursuit of the public good. Democracy is in trouble. Populism is a common scapegoat but not the root cause. More basic are social and economic transformations eroding the foundations of democracy, ruling elites trying to lock in their own privilege, and cultural perversions like making individualistic freedom the enemy of democracy's other crucial ideals of equality and solidarity. In Degenerations of Democracy three of our most prominent intellectuals investigate democracy gone awry, locate our points of fracture, and suggest paths to democratic renewal.In Charles Taylor's phrase, democracy is a process, not an end state. Taylor documents creeping disempowerment of citizens, failures of inclusion, and widespread efforts to suppress democratic participation, and he calls for renewing community. Craig Calhoun explores the impact of disruption, inequality, and transformation in democracy's social foundations. He reminds us that democracies depend on republican constitutions as well as popular will, and that solidarity and voice must be achieved at large scales as well as locally.Taylor and Calhoun together examine how ideals like meritocracy and authenticity have become problems for equality and solidarity, the need for stronger articulation of the idea of public good, and the challenges of thinking big without always thinking centralization.Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar points out that even well-designed institutions will not integrate everyone, and inequality and precarity make matters worse. He calls for democracies to be prepared for violence and disorder at their margins—and to treat them with justice, not oppression.The authors call for bold action building on projects like Black Lives Matter and the Green New Deal. Policy is not enough to save democracy; it will take movements.

1 Degenerations of Democracy

CHARLES TAYLOR

Let’s start off by repeating some very widely known things about the history of the word “democracy,” because they help cast light on our present predicament.

“Democracy,” as everyone knows, stopped being a pejorative term only two hundred years ago. The bad rap goes back to Aristotle. For Aristotle, democracy was the unchecked, as it were, uncontrolled, power of the demos—the demos being the nonelite of the society—over everyone else, including the elites, meaning aristocrats and those with money. Likewise, on the other side, oligarchy was unchecked control by the rich and noble. So, for Aristotle, the best society was what he called a politeia, a balance between the two, a balance of power.

Up until the eighteenth century, if you proposed democracy, including to the authors of the American Constitution, they would have said, “That’s not what we want at all.” They, too, thought in terms of balance, and they called their new polity a “republic,” which is one possible translation of Aristotle’s term: politeia is, after all, the original title of Plato’s great work, which today we call The Republic. But democracy in the late eighteenth century was really bad news.

And then suddenly it becomes our word for the most desirable society. In other words, the term that was previously defined in contrast with a “polity” or “republic”—namely, “democracy”—suddenly usurps their prestige and legitimacy. It becomes our word for what we are fighting to make the world safe for, the highest form of political life.

But this shift leaves in its wake a certain ambiguity, which we can see in the double meaning of the words we use to translate demos—that is, people, peuple, Volk, popolo, and so on. They always have two senses. On one hand, they mean the whole population of the nation, or political entity, as when we speak of the French people or Dutch people being liberated from Nazi occupation in 1944–1945. But, on the other hand, we often use the term for what the Greeks called the demos—that is, the nonelites—just as early moderns distinguished “demotic” languages from Latin and the languages of often conquering elites, or as, today, when political leaders claim that the people are being tricked, exploited, or otherwise maltreated by the elites.

Democracy Is a Telic Concept

Double meaning is ineliminable, because it reflects the ambition behind the word “democracy.” In the end, ideally, these two senses of the word would be fused: there would be a society ruled by the whole people, but without an elite that manages to put the rest in the shade and to operate to their disadvantage. In other terms, democracy would be a truly equal society. Democracy is a telic concept, necessarily a matter of purposes and ideals, not merely conditions or causal relations. It is defined by standards that can never be met.

So, we have different ways of identifying democracy: we say that some countries have a democracy because they have the rule of law, for example, or because they have elections in which all the people can participate. Universal suffrage is the key here, along with the requirement of “free and fair” elections, which in turn require that the media are free. But then we also frequently make another judgment about certain societies that pass the “free and fair” test, to the effect that they are very “undemocratic” because of inequalities—of income, wealth, education, class, or race—which are linked as both cause and effect with disproportionate elite power.

The electoral criterion is of an on / off kind: a country either passes the universal suffrage “free and fair” requirement, or it doesn’t. (The world is, of course, much more fuzzy, but our judgments are categorical.) But the second notion of democracy is telic.

This is a concept of what the ideal should be, what democracy should integrally realize. This would be something like a condition of ideal equality, in which all classes and groups, elites and nonelites alike, would have power proportionate to their numbers to influence and determine outcomes.¹ But this defines a condition that we never fully attain—or maybe we do, for a short time, and then we slide away again. And that gives us the key to a very important dynamic in democracy, which is crucial to my first point, my first path to degeneration.

There are periods when we are moving toward democracy—liberation from foreign rule, liberation from dictatorial rule—the kind of thing that happened in 1989 in Eastern Europe, the kind of thing that seemed about to happen after Tahrir Square during the Arab Spring. And something analogous occurs when there is an assertion of the power of the demos in established democracies (those who meet the electoral criterion).

There’s a great sense of enthusiasm, the sense we are moving in the right direction.

And then there are periods of lower morale, when we feel we are moving away. If you look at the two hundred years of what we now call “democracy in the West,” you see that there were many movements that seemed to be steps forward; for example, the Jacksonian Revolution of the 1820s in the United States was a kind of democratic revolution against a class of elites, against powerful landed interests. But later in the nineteenth century, new and powerful interests asserted themselves—for instance, the “robber barons” in the Gilded Age, against whom the Progressives, and later Theodore Roosevelt, reacted with antitrust legislation.

Starting in some countries in the 1930s, and continuing after the Second World War, there was a further push against unchecked industrial power, with the creation of welfare states, the strengthening of workers’ power, the adoption of policies of full employment, and other elements of social democracy. And then, since about 1975, we have been sliding in the other direction. It is this important feature—of first democratic encouragement, enthusiasm, and moving forward, and then democratic discouragement and sliding backward—to which I would like to call attention.

Part of what masks democratic degeneration is the hold of the first concept, the on / off one. It is widely associated with the renowned economist Joseph Schumpeter, for whom the people are made up of (at least theoretically) equal individuals. They all have the vote. Elites of experts and self-selected politicians actually rule.² But the people periodically vote, and these elections are free and fair. So there is a real possibility that the incumbents can be thrown out, and there is always an alternative elite ready to take over if the present rulers falter.

Let’s call this the “contingency feature.”

This feature also has other requirements. It demands free media, open fora of exchange, the right to organize, and so on. These contribute to free and fair elections; without them the contingency requirement fails to hold. And in some variants (for instance, the US Constitution) there is an attempt to balance unbridled and direct popular will (through, for example, an electoral college made up of local elites to elect the president.)

And today in liberal thinking in the West, there is also a requirement that all be treated equally and fairly. The demand here is for inclusion, even of people who are different from the majority, ethnically, culturally, religiously.

This inclusiveness is, of course, another telic concept, a standard we never fully meet, but may be at any given time approaching or sliding away from. But in this section, I’ll be dealing with the standard directly encoded in the term “democracy”: rule of the people, the demand that nonelites have a significant role in government. I take up the issue of inclusion in the next section.

Now, we have been tempted to believe that the system just described will eventually ensure the endorsement of at least most people. And this consensus will lead (and has in fact led in some cases) to an unprecedented stability in history. Such consensually generated stability is a great reversal from the classical period and even from the late eighteenth century, as I remarked above. The American founders were wary of democracy. They still held the view that goes back to Aristotle. Democracy is rule of the people, in the sense of nonelites. Such rule would bring dangerous instability, even the spoliation of people of property, on which prosperity and civilization depended.

But this anxiety disappears in the quasi-Schumpeterian view, along with the telic concept. And the perception that democracies are stable lies behind the optimistic prognosis of established liberal thought. On this view, the secret of democracy’s appeal is that it offers the rule of law. People can live in security, because their rights are respected, and on the occasions when they aren’t, they can obtain redress in the courts. At the same time, the holding of regular elections under universal suffrage ensures that the interests, at least of the majority, can’t be totally ignored.

So, on this view, democracies can be stable in a way that other regimes can’t. Moreover, these others are bound to come under steadily increasing pressure because of widespread features of our contemporary world. The idea here is that education, the spread of media, economic change, globalization, consumer capitalism, and so on, will break people loose from older allegiances to elite power. Authoritarian countries will eventually sail into seas of instability. The only way in which these can be calmed is by introducing democracy. Hence many predicted that even China will have one day to join the democratic club.

There is some truth to this claim. People living under the rule of law do resist losing their rights, which does make democracy more stable. But history also shows that the lure of strong rule, or the temptation to “overcome disorder,” or purge dangerous elements, can overcome the resistance.

This confident reliance on stability clearly underestimates the resources that authoritarian regimes can draw on: in particular, nationalism, a sense of historic grievance against formerly dominant Western colonial powers, a sense even of humiliation at their hands, and the feeling that these same Western powers are trying to weaken us by destroying the moral fabric of our society and its religion, fostering laxity, homosexuality, and so on. Putin is even trying to create a counter-liberal international on the basis of a common resistance to cultural-moral erosion.

What the optimistic prospect also neglects is the decay and regression within established democracies, which in turn intensifies their inability to respond to new challenges that they face. Overconfidence in the staying power of the rule of law suddenly looks rash in the age of Trump.

The Schumpeterian model seems to suppose that democracy has already irreversibly attained its highest form, so that the restrictive or class-based use of “people” can just be forgotten. Indeed, it is often claimed that it ought to be forgotten, and protagonists of egalitarian policies are often accused of waging “class war.” But what we are now seeing are the ways in which forgetting the telos crucially weakens democracy in the face of certain sorts of authoritarian challenge.

The Decline of Citizen Efficacy

This brings me to my first path of degeneration: for a variety of reasons, democracies always have to remake their telic movement, their pursuit of specific purposes and goals. It may be because, when you move, let’s say, from the early nineteenth century to the late nineteenth century, the sources of power have changed entirely. These sources of power have changed from landed property to industrial power, and power has shifted from landed gentry to large corporations; and then the sources and beneficiaries change again: finance has a tremendously important role to play in the way we live our lives.

Or the need to remake things may arise because of complacency or backsliding when democracy is at high tide, close to its telos.

But, in any case, it is clear that we in Western democracies have been sliding backward since about 1975. We could call it the “Great Downgrade.” What has been progressively lost is a sense of citizen efficacy. I mean the sense that ordinary citizens can have in a democracy, that if they combine their efforts, they can influence government through elections, and thus redress grievances, and bring about tolerable conditions of life for themselves and their families.

The period I’m talking about saw a decline in actual citizen efficacy. And this decline translated into growing inequality; that’s the fruit of it, but it’s also the cause of it. That is why I talk about “slides,” though they are not straight descents, but have more of a spiraling effect.

One such effect is this: the more people feel they don’t have any real power in relation to the elites—that their fate is being decided elsewhere, such as by whether there is going to be employment in their area, or good and secure jobs, or affordable education for their children—the more they feel discouraged about their ability to influence these conditions and the less they vote. And, in fact, the last decades of the twentieth century saw a decline in the levels of participation in just about all Western democracies. Some started from a higher and some from a lower level of participation, but, generally speaking, the trend was downward. And, of course, that abstention increased the power of money and special interests, so the discouragement got deeper.

In the last couple of decades, electoral participation has been going up in many countries. In the United States, it reached an all-time peak in the 2020 presidential election. But this was because of the polarization that came about through what have been called “populist” challenges to liberal democracy. The challengers, such as Donald Trump, claimed to offer increased citizen efficacy, but in relation to the real grievances and inequality that nonelites suffered from, the offer was pure sham. In fact, the Trump presidency exacerbated inequality—for instance, with the tax cut of 2017—and chipped away at the Affordable Care Act.

There is a danger here for a spiraling downward—indeed, for various kinds of downward spirals, which feed on themselves.

The Decline of Equal Citizenship

It is worth pausing to look more closely at the changes in Western democracies since 1975, something Craig Calhoun will do in a more sustained discussion in Chapter 2. In the decades after the Second World War (in the United States starting with the New Deal), the political life of these democracies was frequently centered on a polarization between Left and Right, which brought about the development of welfare states, some nationalization and / or state economic planning, the extension of the rights and powers of organized labor, and so on. These were proposed and legislated for by parties of the Left, opposed or moderated by a main party of the Right. Political regimes were jointly created in the course of this competition / struggle. The dominant theme of these polities was a...